Cibola Burn

The investigator reaches out, but not at random. It looks for a path, and doesn’t find one. It looks for a path, and doesn’t find one. It looks for a path and finds one. Not there, not quite, but close. Two points define a line. One point is alive, and one point is death. Neither came from here. Bang those rocks together and see what sparks. See what burns.

The investigator is the tool for finding what is missing, and so it exists. All the rest is artifact. The craving for beer. The hat. The memory, and the humor, and the weird half-fondness half-contempt for something named James Holden. The love for a woman who is dead. The longing for a home that will never be. Extraneous. Meaningless.

The investigator reaches out, finds Holden. It smiles. There was a man once, and his name was Miller. And he found things, but he doesn’t anymore. He saved people if he could. He avenged them if he couldn’t. He sacrificed when he had to. He found the things that were missing. He knew who’d done it, and he did the obvious things because they were obvious. The investigator had grown through his bones, repopulated his eyes with new and unfamiliar life, taken his shape.

It found the murder weapon. It knew what happened, at least in broad strokes. The fine work was for the prosecutors anyway, assuming it went to trial. But it wouldn’t. There were other things the tool was good for. The investigator knew how to kill when it needed to.

More than that, it knew how to die.

Chapter Forty-Five: Havelock

Havelock still wasn’t convinced that Naomi Nagata was the best engineer in the system, but after watching her work, he had to concede there probably wasn’t a better one. If some of the people on the Israel had more degrees or specialties in which they outpaced her, Naomi could make it up in sheer, bloody-minded wildness.

Okay, we can’t wait any longer,” she said to the muscle-bound bald man on the screen. “If he shows back up, tell him where we stand up here.”

“Pretty sure the cap’n trusts your judgment,” Amos said. “But yeah. I’ll tell him. Anything else I should pass on?”

“Tell him he’s got about a billion messages from Fred and Avasarala.” Alex’s voice came across the comm and also through the hatchway to the cockpit. “They’re talkin’ about building a mass driver, sending us relief supplies.”

“Yeah?” Amos said. “How long’s that gonna take?”

“About seven months,” Naomi said. “But at the outside, we’ll only have been dead for three of them.”

Amos grinned. “Well, you kids don’t have too much fun without me.”

“No danger,” Naomi said and broke the connection.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Havelock asked.

“Nope,” Naomi replied. She pulled herself closer to the command console. “How’s it going out there, Basia?”

The comm channel clicked and the Belter’s voice hissed into the operations deck. The sound reverberated without giving any sense of spaciousness. A whisper in a coffin. “We’re getting close out here. This is a lot of ugly.”

“Good thing we’ve got a great welder,” she said. “Keep me in the loop.”

The screens on the ops deck showed the operation in all its stages: what they’d managed so far, what they still hoped. And the countdown timer that marked the hours that remained before the Barbapiccola started to scrape against Ilus’ exosphere and changed from a fast-moving complex of ceramic and metal into a firework.

Not days. Hours.

The tether itself looked like two webs connected by a single, hair-thin strand. All along the belly of the Rocinante, a dozen ceramic-and-steel foot supports made for a broad base, the black lines meeting at a hard ceramic juncture a few hundred meters out. The Barbapiccola underneath them almost had all of the answering structures in place. Once the Belter had the foot supports installed there too, it would be time for the Martian corvette to use its battery power to tug the Belter ship into a more stable orbit, along with its cargo of lithium ore. The complexity of the situation made Havelock a little lightheaded. As he watched, the display showing the surface of the Barbapiccola stuttered, and one of the red-flagged foot supports changed to green.

“Okay,” Naomi said over the open channel. “We’re reading solid on that one. Let’s move on.”

“Yeah, give me one more minute here,” Basia’s compressed voice said. “There’s a seam here I don’t like. I’m just going to…” The words trailed off. The readout stuttered red and then green again. “Okay. That’s got it. Moving on.”

“Be careful,” Alex broke in. “Keep the torch cold when you’re moving. These lines’ve got great tensile strength, but they’re crap for heat resistance.”

“Done this before,” Basia said.

“Partner,” Alex said. “I don’t think anyone’s done this before.”